15 Mind-Blowing Old-Timey Photos You Won't Believe Are Real

As we've reminded you before, people in the past just didn't give a shit. They were too busy being crazy and taking pictures of it to be bothered with how those pictures would make them look in 80 or 90 years. It's like they're daring us to make sense of them, and once again, we've risen boldly to the challenge.

#15. "That's Two People Sharing a Costume, Right?"

OK, this is definitely some kind of optical illusion. The little girl's real legs are clearly hidden behind that log or something, because otherwise they would've had to spend a lot of time digitally erasing all of the villagers trying to set her on fire.

Pictured here is Ella Harper, a Tennessee native better known across the country as the Camel Girl. She suffered from congenital genu recurvatum, which is a disorder that weakens the ligaments in the knees and causes them to bend backward, gradually or all the damned way. Like many people with physical deformities in the 1800s, Ella was a star circus attraction for many years, which presumably then segued into a featured role in Charlie Sheen's The Arrival.

She is believed to have suffered from Milroy disease, which turns the lower half of your body into a Ninja Turtle and the upper half into a low-wage carnival worker. She was otherwise healthy and could actually walk (although with some difficulty). She was married and lived a normal life, aside from her career being a "look at my giant feet" sideshow freak.

#13. UFOs Caused the Dust Bowl

Those men are not running in terror from an alien spaceship or a time traveler's pod arriving from the year 2250. It's just a tetrahedral kite, developed by Alexander Graham Bell in an attempt to build kites large enough for people to ride in. Which, you have to admit, sounds awesome.

The idea was also to make them so a motor could be installed, thus creating the first manned aircraft, but the end result was just a bunch of admittedly cool-looking kites that could only ever possibly be piloted by G.I. Joes.

#12. Fritz the Talking Nazi Bear

Despite the perfectly legible road sign, these Nazis decided to stop and ask a bear for directions and were delighted to find him sympathetic to their cause! See, kids, cartoons are real! But only for the Nazis!

Honestly, that isn't far from the truth. This is literally a road sign somewhere between Berlin and St. Petersburg hilariously outfitted with a Nazi bear (it's just a stuffed bear, sadly). These guys stopped and took a picture because you totally would have, too.

That's not an isolated situation, by the way; for some reason that the History Channel has never bothered to explain, Nazi funny bones were well and truly tickled by taxidermy bears. And they were all adorable!

#11. Depression-Era Robot Porn

What, you thought robot porn was invented in Internet-era Japan? That picture up there is from 1935, bitches. We bet you didn't think they even had robots back then.

This is in fact a picture of some guy dressed up as Alpha the Robot, a popular World's Fair attraction, for the 1935 World's Fair in San Diego. He just happened to stumble across some nudists, who for some reason were also at the World's Fair, and posed with them for a few pictures, most of them containing way more FDR-era nudity.

#9. Pointy Two-Skull

There really isn't any imaginary explanation for this one that's weirder than the truth: This is a photo of the remains of the Two-Headed Boy of Bengal. It currently resides in the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of London, because when the boy's parents refused to donate his body after he died from a cobra bite at the age of 4, the English courageously dug him up and chopped his head off. For science.

#8. The Sphinx, as Seen in a Dystopian Future

This looks like the Great Sphinx of Giza got buried in the sand after the Mummy threw his angry-face sandstorm tantrum at Brendan Fraser in one of those movies. Or maybe it's what the Sphinx will look like a thousand years from now, after mankind is no longer around to maintain it.

It's actually the opposite of that -- this is just what the Sphinx used to look like, before excavators finished uncovering it in the early 20th century. Today it looks like this:

Getty"Finally, some damn leg room."

Which could lead you to believe that the ancient wonder was in pristine condition when it was built 4,500 years ago, and has steadily degraded to its current state over the centuries. The reality is that it got completely buried in sand a few thousand years ago, and stayed that way until the 1800s: